What Chickens do

I have a fantastic camera that I can barely use. Yes, I’ve taken thousands of pictures with it, but I’m just now learning how to adjust all it’s manual settings to mimic my old Pentax (film) 35mm camera. With my Project 365: The Daily Chicken I choose one picture I’ve taken daily. Often I take dozens of photos just to get the right lighting and best pose.

One thing I’ve learned this month is photographing snow can be tough. Sometimes it’s overexposed because my light meter is reading the saturation of a dark chicken, sometimes my chickens look black and the snow perfect. Yesterday I had the smart idea of photographing the food in the snow first to get my settings (F-stop, ISO etc.) correct before I let the chickens out. ultimately despite my preparations I wasn’t impressed with the photos–they were okay, but looked too much like a recent daily chicken photo.

As you can see in the photos below, I flipped through a few settings as I took pictures of Strawberry Sally.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Here’s the photo I ultimately selected for yesterday’s Daily Chicken — I just loved Sally’s expression over the bread and muffin, the vertically aligned composition, and the array of russet and brown tones in the photograph.

Have you ever heard of Project 365? It’s a photo a day for a year. Some people shoot something new everyday, others stick to one subject for a month and then move on. Me? Well, we all know chickens are gorgeous birds, so why not them?

Dolly is our smallest chicken. She’s happy and healthy and weighs in at about 5 pounds.

Chickens aren’t too heavy to fly, but they generally don’t fly very far or very high. According to animalquestions.org, here’s why:

It is true that in most cases (unless they are too heavy) that chickens are indeed able to fly. However it should be noted that they are only able to fly for short distances at a time, on average from about three to four feet. Chickens usually fly to flee from danger or a predator, in which case they may be seen flying vertically up to an object, or just horizontally to get out of the way. They have also been known to fly when not represented by danger, for instance simply in experimenting around their surroundings. Maybe they’re bored.

Chickens can also fly up to roosts as turkeys do, though some breeds of chickens have been known to have better flying ability compared to others. Chickens that weigh too much are not able to fly, due to the fact that they are simply too heavy. Also contrary to what some people may believe, chickens are not able to fly to migrate. They are not migratory birds and do not have this ability, also if you remember they are unable to fly for long distances. It would take a chicken forever to migrate even if they could.

My chickens fly when there’s food to be had or they’re scared. Here’s Dolly in action.